


Cron Job

by Carbon65



Series: Repository [1]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Birds of Prey (Comic)
Genre: Computer Programming, Five Stages of Grief, Gen, Graduate School, Injury Recovery, Mentor/Protégé, Permanent Injury, PhDon't, imposter syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 09:23:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18091706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbon65/pseuds/Carbon65
Summary: Barbara's boss comes into her office every day on his way headed home from work.Barbara cries every day after he leaves.It's scheduled like clockwork.





	Cron Job

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted a _qsub_ , but I took it down and deleted it. IDK. So, this has a lot of that, but some new content, too.
> 
> Warnings  
> \--------  
> Possibly an abusive relationship?  
> Injury recovery and some grieving

>   
>  The software utility `cron` is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. People who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. … Cron is most suitable for scheduling repetitive tasks.

\--[Wikipeda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron)

* * *

“Barbara.”

“Ummm?” 

She’s in the middle of something, trying to figure out how to debug a new method that yes, she knows, really needs to be done soon, but that’s why she’s been spending so much time on it.

“Barbara.” 

Oh fuck, that’s her bosses voice.

She pulls out her earphones, and uses one hand to support herself as she twists to face him. Her PT says she needs to do it, and so she might as well do it during Eric’s visit.

Eric’s frown makes her reconsider her decision, and she pulls on her wheels so she can turn to face him.

There’s the computer chair she sometimes uses pushed to the side, and Erick _could_ sit in it. You know, so they’d be close to the same height. Eric is a head taller than her father, close to Bruce Wayne’s height. He’s lean, not slight, but he also lack’s Bruce’s impressive, imposing shoulders.  
Eric chooses not to sit.

“When will you have the walkability calculations done?” He asks. His voice is quiet to make it clear that he doesn’t need to yell. He could, if he wanted to. But, he doesn’t need to.

She swallows, and tries to remind herself not to apologize. She knows he’s not going to like it, and she braces herself. Eric likes to tell you the timeline in which things will be done, and you need to make his timeline happen. “Three weeks,” she says, know it’s the wrong answer. “I’m still validating the algorithm.”

And she needs time to pull together visualizations and make them nice because Eric will send them to the collaborators who will doubtless use whatever shitty visualizations she pulls together in whatever presentations and grant applications they put out for the next six months until it’s almost time for publication. And then, they’ll come back and tell her what they really wanted. Which… which is enough motivation to spend the extra twelve or fourteen hours that will make the figures pretty. Which Eric is probably aware of. Because Eric knows these things.

“That’s unacceptable.” 

There’s an uncomfortable finality in the words, a weight. She swallows and resists the urge to smooth her legs, a nervous tick she’s developed recently. Hell, she didn’t ever used to have nervous ticks. Batgirl couldn’t afford to be nervous, and Barbara learned to have nerves of steel.  
The … accident changed a lot.

“Let me know if I need to pull people off the cluster.” The words are louder than they need to be. They feel like a threat, rather than a helpful offer. Eric will pull people off the cluster for Barbara. But, that then means that Barbara needs to figure out how to utilize the cluster. Which either means bringing in Scott to work on the project, which… Scott is already too busy on something else related to this grant application.  
Or, maybe Sanjay or Carlos or Adam. Except that if she brings any of them in, it will become their project and they’ll need authorship, maybe shared first authorship. And, when Eric talks about it, it will be Sanjay and Barbara or Carlos and not Barabara… as though her inability to figure out how to run things in parallel in a language with notoriously bad parallel processing destroys the fact that she’s developed, written, and mostly validated the algorithm herself. Scott did code review, and he’ll be on the paper for it, but it’s Barbara baby. 

She nods, murmurs thanks.

Eric hoists his bag on his shoulders. “I’ll let you go… check back tomorrow.” Again, the words feel like a threat rather than a promise. _I’ll check back tomorrow, and you’d better have progress for me._ And then, he leaves.

Barbara waits for the click of the fire door at the end of to the corridor, counts to ten, then ten again. She waits until the fire door at the end of the corridor snicks shut. And then, she wheels ot her office door and shuts it. There’s something comforting about having a door she can shut. By rights, she should be down in the cubicle farm with the other grad students, but the cubicle farm is neigh-on impossible to access. So, they’d moved her up here, to a sunny second story office which she shares part time with the financial manager for one of the bigger labs and a postdoc who is currently on maternity leave.

She’s up here, so she can close her door to cry. If she was down there, someone would come by. Tommy would let her sit in his little box and just cry. Marie would offer to take her home, to Marie’s mess of a house outside of Gotham proper, and let her sit with her massive dog. Claire would wrap her in a hug and give her good, sensible advice about when to use “Bless your heart” with one’s academic advisor. Claire has that whole being southern nice thing down. Barbara is still working on nice.

Here, she closes her door because she doesn’t want Eric to see her cry. She doesn’t want anyone else in the corridor to see it either. People react so badly to a woman who cries when she gets emotional. It doesn’t really matter. Iit’s almost six, and most of the professors in this wing have already left. They’ve got kids and families and business dinners and lives. But, Barbara’s a graduate student, and she’s decided to gamble her early 20s on some nebulous dream someone told her she should want.  
She supposes that she used to do that before, that being a vigilante was sitting on some nebulous dream. But, there was always a concrete answer. You either were doing it, or you weren’t. Not like this schrodinger's job, where you’re not considered gainfully employed but you’re also working sixty or seventy hours a week who relies on your progress but also controls some of your future. 

The past week, she thinks she’s cried every day. Of course, Eric has stopped by every day, asking how long the project will take. He waits until he’s done with his meetings, and then drops by just before he heads home for the night. It’s a good way to guarantee that Barbara’s current 75% time commitment gets extended… not that it wouldn’t have anyway. He expects a change in the estimate tomorrow, he expects things to be faster tomorrow. The only way that will remotely happen is if Barbara stays late. If she dries her eyes and pulls herself back together and keeps pushing through things. 

There’s a part of her brain that says she shouldn’t do this. But, there’s a part that feels guilty. Eric has been good to her: Eric is the only person who would take her after her accident. Well, after she semi burned her bridges with a few other members of the department and they complained she was impulsive and immature and lazy and stubborn and lazy and brilliant. But, Eric fought to keep her, fought to make sure there were accommodations, fought to make sure she got an office she could access. Eric let her work with code, sent her to work with his computer programmers so she could get better, and holds her to a high standard because she’s good at her job. Eric’s letting her schedule her lab responsibilities around PT, he’s only asked her to move it once or twice for something she had to attend. Working for Eric Bishop is one of the best professional opportunities she could have had; if she can survive him for another few years, she’ll have his name in her academic family tree and she’ll have it made.

Knowing everything that’s good about working for Eric doesn’t stop the way her stomach fills with some sort of creepy-crawly insect. She doesn’t get butterflies, she gets caterpillars or millipedes or pill bugs that crowd eachother and squirm and make her feel empty in a way butterflies never do. Knowing the promise doesn’t stop the tears that are burning at her eyes.

She puts her head down on her desk, and she lets herself cry. She wants to crawl underneath it and make herself small. She wants to hide in a dark place. She wants to pull on a black cowl and a gray body suit and run through the streets of Gotham until she’s run far away from here and far away from any questions about walkability.  
She wants to go someplace that’s home.  
She wants to go to someone who is home.  
She wants to go back to when home was. 

She can’t, though. She can’t go back and she can’t stop crying and feeling like she’s failed in so many ways. And, she can’t seem to move forward either. 

She lets herself wallow, lets the tears come up unbidden and embarrassing. She… she never used to cry this much. Back in her first year, when she was running on redbull, adrenaline, hummus, Pad Thai, and vigilantism, she never had these problems. She could fight all night and work all day. She didn’t need to sleep. She could just go.

Now… now that isn’t an option. Her body tells her when it needs sleep. Her body governs her mind, and it doesn’t seem to matter how much training she has, she can’t force herself to work more than her body allows. She’s heard analogies about cutlery and descriptions about how things that used to be easy are just more difficult now. Like those are things to accept. And then, there are the people who insist that it’s just a question of mind over matter: that fatigue and burnout and jetlag and illness are just the unfortunate side effects of some sort of personal failure on her part. If she was just smarter or harder working, she would be able to power through. And, maybe they’re right. Maybe the… maybe IT broke something inside of her mind as well as her body. 

And, whichever it was that failed her first, her body or her mind, it frightens her. Because she knows that it doesn’t matter where the failure comes from, and it doesn’t matter how smart she is, this is a thing that will keep her from succeeding more than anything else. To be at the top of your field, to have extracurricular activities like the ones she misses so badly… to be able to do any of that, you not only need to be smart and hard working, you also need a body you can trust to keep working. And, Barbara’s body and Barbara’s mind both break if they’re under too much of this kind of pressure for too long. 

And, somehow, that knowledge compounds everything else and she feels like the tears won’t stop. She’s still angry. She’s been angry on and off. She was so angry for a while that some Dick gave her one of those sets of children’s dishes made out of neigh unbreakable plastic.

She’s been angry and resentful of everyone and everything. They got to keep going. They get to keep going. Eric’s not in their offices breathing down their asses. It’s only Barbara he doesn’t trust.

She tried begging, she’s tried bargaining with Eric and herself and the Universe. She's tried asking everyone and everything: the student services office and the department chair, and her physical therapists and doctors and collaborators and Eric himself. She _knows_ he's reviewed enough that he can dodge grant deadlines. She knows. She can’t bargain with him about that. Just like she can’t bargain with anyone about what happened. Just like she can’t bargain with her body to give her more hours in her day so she can get this algorithm done.

Which just leaves her with … Sad. And, sad is just. It’s not an an emotion anymore. Sad is.  
And, maybe, now, she’s crying because she’s sad. Or because she’s overwhelmed. She’s probably crying because she’s mad… and she’s always hated that about herself. She cries when she’s mad and she’s mostly mad at her own failures. Maybe she’s a little mad at Eric, but the person she was BEFORE could have done this, and so she must be the point of failure. She’s crying because she’s tired, because her new body isn’t able to go out all night and fight, get five hours of sleep, and then hit the ground running fueled by mocha and a breakfast big enough to feed a teenage boy. Her new body needs sleep. It needs space. It needs, it needs, it needs.  
But, Eric needs, too.

And, the thought of her boss causes a fresh wave of the fear and failure to wash over her. Maybe if she hadn’t been hurt, she wouldn’t be sitting here, disappointing him. Maybe if she hadn’t been hurt… if she hadn’t… if she was good enough in and of herself, he wouldn’t come into her office to loom over her.  
That is all there is to it.

Maybe, maybe, maybe… maybe this is just how things are supposed to be, and your advisor is supposed to hold you accountable, and she’s just not good enough. Maybe that’s all it is.

And, she supposes that if she’s going to feel inadequate, she might as well try. She might as well see if she can get the thing done, so he can submit the grant, so she can submit the paper, so she can finally work on her thesis work and graduate.

She pulls the last of the tissues out of the last empty box by her desk, and writes a reminder in black sharpie to buy more. Or steal them. Or something. She pulls her headphones back on, and tries to quell the butterflies in her stomach. 

She can do this. She’s Barbara Fucking Gordon, the girl who survived. She’s Barbara Fucking Gordon and she had her regularly scheduled five pm cry, and now she’s got about three hours in her before she will collapse. It’s time, and she can fucking do it.

She says the words out loud, just so she can hear them. “I’m Barbara-Fucking-Gordon, and I can do this.”  
She’d just as soon that if someone is going to lie, they say the words outright.

**Author's Note:**

> I literally did not know how badly I needed Barbara Gordon, PhD in my life until I found her. Like, I know how people talk about needing to see yourself represented on screen, and holy hell... a disabled woman who does informatics and programs better than the men in her life? Sign me the fuck up. 
> 
> So, umm, that said, this fic is sort of personal in that way? Questions, Comments, Concerns, and commiseration about grad school all welcome and appreciated.


End file.
